Author: Nate

Akademy 2018 talk: Konquering the World

I had the pleasure of attending Akademy this year–my first time. Not only that, the organizers were actually crazy enough to let me give a talk! In it, I discuss my view of how we can systematically improve the competitiveness and reach of KDE Plasma and KDE apps, and what you can do to be a part of this effort. This master plan is what guides my KDE work. I talk about how the Usability & Productivity initiative fits into the plan, but the plan itself is much more ambitious. If you’ve ever wondered whether there’s a method to my madness… here it is!

If you’re interested, the Akademy organizers have posted a video of it:

If you feel like this effort is worthwhile and that my leadership of it is important, consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 34

Amazing how time flies. We’re already on week 34 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity reports!

First I want to specially highlight some critically important fixes for Samba shares that landed this week:

I’m very happy to report that more Samba improvements are on the way too, including a critical fix for an issue that causes silent data loss when using a non-KDE app that performs atomic saves (such as LibreOffice or Blender) to save modified files that are located on a Samba share originally accessed from Dolphin.

My sense is that that poor samba sharing support is a strategic issue causing pain to many of our users and preventing others from using our software. I’d like to verify this theory, so if these fixes benefit you or you’ve experienced more pain points with Samba beyond what’s already fixed or planned, please share in the comments.

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

Next week, your name could be in this list! Just check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters.

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 33

Time for your weekly dose of Usability & Productivity! It’s another big one, and there’s a ton of stuff winding through the review pipeline that didn’t quite make the cut this week. So tune in next week too–but for the moment, check out all these neat improvements:

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

Next week, your name could be in this list! Just check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters.

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 32

I’m back from Akademy, and I can’t wait to share some of the cool stuff that happened there over the past week. I’m going to post the video of my talk as soon as it’s up. But first, I know what you’re all really waiting for: this week’s Usability & Productivity update. Though we were all quite busy, somehow everyone managed to accomplish an enormous amount of work, too!

In particular there has been a momentous amount of improvement to Kate and the code that underpins it: the Syntax Highlighting and KTextEditor frameworks. These frameworks are used to provide text editor views to the Kate, KWrite, KDevelop, and Kile apps, so any improvements to them are felt very widely within the universe of KDE apps. I want to recognize the efforts of Christoph Cullmann, Dominik Haumann, Kåre Sårs, and Sven Brauch for their stunning amount of work. While I was working on this post Tuesday night, there was a time when I was literally (not figuratively, I mean literally literally) unable to document the improvements as fast as they would show up in my email inbox. These guys deserve the community’s respect for the stunning quantity of work they performed in an astonishingly small amount of time. Let’s give ’em all a round of applause.

But that’s not all! Take a look at the full list, which includes many, many more nice improvements:

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

Next week, your name could be in this list! Just check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters.

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 31

This week we’re all at Akademy–KDE’s yearly gathering of developers, designers, system administrators, and users. I’m giving a presentation later today about how we can make KDE Software irresistible!

As such, it as a bit of a lighter week for the Usability & Productivity initiative, what with all the preparation and conference-going, but we still managed to get quite a bit done. And all the in-person interactions are setting the stage for many more good things to come.

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

Next week, your name could be in this list! Just check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters.

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 30

Akademy is next week (I will be there!), but that didn’t stop us from plugging away on the Usability and Productivity initiative! Check it out:

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

Next week, your name could be in this list! Just check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and wind out how you can help be a part of something that really matters.

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 29

Another week, another set of Usability and Productivity improvements! This week we fixed a lot of bugs in preparation for the KDE Applications 18.08 release as well as for Plasma itself.

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

Next week, your name could be in this list! Just check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and wind out how you can help be a part of something that really matters.

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 28

Here’s another big week for KDE’s Usability and Productivity initiative. We’re getting ready for the release of KDE Applications 18.08–the second of our three yearly Applications releases. As the numbers in the version suggest, it will be released in August of 2018, about a month from now. As such, there’s been a lot of focus on new features and polish for core KDE apps such as Dolphin, Gwenview, Konsole, and Spectacle. We’re also ramping up our work for KDE Plasma 5.14, which is scheduled for release in October.

To learn more about KDE’s software release schedule, check out https://community.kde.org/Schedules. To learn more about what we did last week, keep reading!

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

Wanna be a part of this? Of course you do, because you want to make a difference, and you want to help make the world’s best free operating system even better. It’s more important than ever. So hop on over to https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved! There’s room for everyone, and you don’t even need to be a programmer! I’d never written a line of C++ or QML before getting started in the KDE community. You can do it!

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 27

Get ready for a humongous week for KDE’s Usability and Productivity initiative! KDE developers and contributors squashed a truly impressive number of bugs this week, all the while adding features and polishing the user interface.

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

There are still more bugs I’d like to get fixed ASAP, though, including a number of high-profile regressions with the mouse and touchpad settings in Plasma 5.13. I hope very much that we can fix these soon. If anyone reading this feels like they could help out, please do so! We’re happy to lend a hand when first getting started as a KDE contributor. There are lots of other ways to get involved, too.

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 26

This was quite a bugfixy week in KDE’s Usability and Productivity initiative, but we managed to squeeze in a cool new feature! See for yourself:

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

See all the names of people who worked hard to make the computing world a better place? That could be you next week! Getting involved isn’t all that tough, and there’s lots of support available. Give it a try today! It’s easy and fun and important.

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.